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Women in the Diaspora: Palestinian Self-Perception of the Colonial Experience
Abstract by Lana Shehadeh On Session V-14  (Negotiating Belonging and Identity)

On Wednesday, November 13 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Palestinians in the diaspora have migrated in waves during major political events in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Such migration required that Palestinian women leave the familiarity of the Palestinian territories to the unfamiliar in the diaspora. Given the difference in the ease of accessibility and movement within the diaspora, many Palestinians struggled with their sense of reality and what it means to be a Palestinian woman outside of the colonial experience. For them, movement through checkpoints and the exponential threat they faced as females in a violent landscape became their own internalized normal; while the ease of movement, space, and transportation in the diaspora and its decreased sense of gender violence was abnormal. In this chapter, I explore the effects of Israeli policies of closure and separation on the experience and self-perception of identity and reality for Palestinian women in the diaspora. To explore this conundrum of self-perception of one’s human landscape within a colonial setting and outside of it; I interview 20 Palestinian women from the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip who migrated to the United States between the years of 1970 through 2019 to transcribe their lived experiences within the colonial settler state. Their interviews shed light on the human landscape developed within the self-perception of Palestinian women given their experience living under occupation in the colonial settler landscape of the Palestinian territories. They also assist in understanding the ever-changing spatial parameters and rules of contemporary forms of colonial power on the experience of women in the Middle East. Here I rely primarily on an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the colonial settler studies with feminist theory and its relation to the Palestinian female experience.
Discipline
Interdisciplinary
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None